This is an impossible game to rate on a numbered scale. The score below ultimately reflects an arbitrary placement, one that makes the game seem merely middling when it’s really like a full-course meal that was delicious but an absolute pain to work through. Eastward is far from the YIIK class of terrible “Earthboundlike” games, and certainly deserves more attention than that mess. If you have a lot of patience, this is an easy recommendation. And if you have none, I would stay far away. I’m not sure if I’ll ever head Eastward again, but the journey will always remain fresh in my mind.
While it falls just short of being a masterpiece, Dread proves itself worthy of Metroid’s legacy with high fluidity, some fantastic setpieces, and a few particularly killer robots.
Life Is Strange: True Colors tries to tell a mature story, one of grieving and self-loathing, how it transforms our lives and others, how we come not to find relationships but build them with those around us. But for all of these themes, it scarcely succeeds at capturing any one of them. It can be compelling, captivating, and charming at one moment and forcefully maudlin at others. It tries to capture the full rainbow spectrum of human emotions, every last hue and shade that makes up the complexities of ourselves. But it only has four colors.
There’s so much more I could go on about – the customizability, the perfect pacing and length, the world map thrice as rich and dense as Zelda 1’s, the little moments of LGBT rep, the charm of all the names, how it manages it be more than the sum of its already gorgeous parts – but I don’t know if I’d be able to stop. Chicory: A Colorful Tale is a special game, one as finely crafted as it is sentimentally inspired, brimming with color for an experience so seemingly monochromatic. There’s only one word for it: art.
Much like a Pink Floyd laser light show at your local planetarium, The Artful Escape can razzle and dazzle, but you probably won’t remember it too long after the fact.
I can imagine somebody else looking at this game and considering it middling, subpar even. Action mechanics that are lower than top of the line, the graphics are outdated, and those allergic to anything remotely “Anime” would scoff. But Rune Factory isn’t trying to be anything it’s not. It’s a game where you can grow a radish, forge that radish into a long sword, and use it to murder sheep monsters while calling your gay partner affectionate nicknames. And do I personally want anything else from a video game? Not without becoming greedy. After a long slumber, the reawakening of this sub-franchise is much beloved, and I sincerely hope to see a Rune Factory 6 sooner than nine years from now.
I’ve been an Uchikoshi fan for almost a decade at this point, and nirvanA Initiative might be his most singularly satisfying experience yet – blissfully complete and fully itself. In an age where more and more media feels homogenized into a singular paste, there is nothing else like it. Its personality is so strong that you’ll find it either utterly repulsive or intoxicatingly magnetic. There are parts I hate, but so much more that I love. And accepting it for its flaws and everything that makes me roll my eyes or grit my teeth, alongside its deeply, deeply affecting moments and enticingly endless web of a plot – that feels truly enlightening.